Bus Riders Fight for Their Right to Service, 55 Years After Montgomery

Bus Riders Fight for Their Right to Service, 55 Years After Montgomery

by

Bob Allen and Marcy Rein

Fifty-five years to the month
after the start of the Montgomery bus boycott, people of color can sit
wherever they want on the bus-when and if one arrives. Bus operators
all over the country are slashing routes in response to deepening deficits.
This loss of service denies people who depend on transit their civil
rights in deep, daily, grinding, unmistakable ways.

Bus riders in Oakland, California
and throughout western Alameda and Contra Costa Counties lost nearly
15 percent of their AC Transit routes in 2010.

"We are the heart throb of
this city," AC Transit driver Lorenzo Jacobs said, speaking at a May
2010 public hearing against the cuts. "When you start cutting service,
you're cutting opportunities out there for people who are doing whatever
they're doing in their lives. When you cut lines, you're affecting
people's lives, their everyday lives," he said.

The service cuts directly impact
Oakland youth, who need AC Transit to get to school because the district
doesn't run yellow school buses; they hurt seniors and people with
disabilities who can't drive, and low-income families who can't
afford cars. Lack of mobility cuts off opportunities for work and education,
enforces inequality and persistent segregation. African-Americans and
Latinos are far less likely than whites to own cars. Nationally, around
62 percent of city bus riders are African American and Latino. Nearly
80 percent of AC Transit riders are people of color.

Bus riders and their allies
who take on this 21st century civil rights fight confront
institutional obstacles at every turn. In their efforts to protect and
expand service, they contend with financing policies and decision-making
structures that are stacked against them, and they lack access to the
courts to seek redress. And few political leaders champion the needs
of transit riders in general and bus riders in particular.

Funding priorities from the
federal government on down shortchange bus riders while favoring drivers
and rail passengers. Eighty percent of federal transportation funding
goes to highways, and only 20 percent goes to transit. Virtually all
of the $500 billion in the Federal Surface Transportation Authorization
goes to capital costs versus supporting day-to-day operations of buses.

On a regional level, the San
Francisco Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC)
privileges costly expansions over core urban operations. It consistently
slights bus operators in favor of rail services such as CalTrain and
BART that have a much higher proportion of white and wealthier riders.
While AC Transit was looking at a $56 million deficit, the MTC was working
hard to help BART find an additional $70 million to build the
Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) tram project. That $70 million was needed
to replace federal stimulus funds BART lost by failing to follow proper
civil rights guidelines when they approved the OAC.

The structure of the MTC itself
disenfranchises city-dwellers and people of color. The 19-member commission
controls transportation planning and funding for nine counties in the
Bay Area. Because each county gets two seats at most, residents in large
urban counties--like Santa Clara, which includes the 930,000-person
city of San Jose--get far less representation than smaller and less
diverse counties like Napa, with its 135,000 people.

Challenging the unfair distribution
of transportation resources in court has been much harder since a 2001
Supreme Court decision barred individuals from filing lawsuits over
transportation policies that have discriminatory impacts on the basis
of race, color or national origin. By taking away the "private right
to action," the Alexander v. Sandoval decision deprived transit activists
of a legal tool that has played a key part in civil rights cases.

After more than a year, the
movement centered in Montgomery won the legal end to Alabama's segregation
laws. Today's transportation justice advocates are pushing for civil
rights in transit on many levels. Riders and drivers have joined forces
to try save bus service in dozens of cities around the country, as they
are doing in the East Bay. These efforts should gain fresh energy with
the inauguration of the new national leadership of the ATU, which represents
bus drivers in many U.S. cities.

A Bay Area coalition of civil
rights, faith-based, community and environmental groups is pursuing
legal challenges to discriminatory funding. The non-profit law firm
Public Advocates filed the administrative complaint on behalf of Urban
Habitat, TransForm and Genesis that cost BART the stimulus funds for
the OAC. In a follow-up complaint, they have charged MTC with failing
to ensure that agencies and programs it funds are respecting civil rights.
In addition, Public Advocates has filed a class action suit against
MTC's funding practices, which is pending before the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals.

Undaunted by the hostile climate in the new Congress, the new national coalition called “Transit Riders for Public Transportation” (TRPT) aims to flip federal transit funding priorities and strengthen anti-discrimination tools. TRPT draws together grassroots groups from all over the country who put transportation central to the fight for civil rights, recognizing that low-income communities and communities of color will remain trapped in second-class status until the transportation system serves everyone equally.

Further

Almost everyone hates Indiana's egregious "religious freedom" law - cue fierce backlash from businesses, churches, states, cities, legal experts and unhateful Hoosiers - but the most creative response came from an enterprising libertarian who delightedly used his new religious freedom to found the First Church of Cannabis - "One Toke, One Smile, One Love" - aimed at "celebrating all that is good in our hearts." His goal: "A House of Hemp Built with Love," and presumably lots of munchies.